'Snow. Deep snow. Snow and cold and dark. These are my first memories.' Henning Mankell, the writer whose detective novels are now international bestsellers, grew up in the far north of Sweden. In the summer, it is flooded by light, but in the autumn it can be wet and muddy, bleached of colours and, in the long winter, it is almost permanent dusk and night.

Something of this Swedish climate seems to have soaked into Mankell's writing, which is melancholy and austerely poetic. His serial detective, Kurt Wallander, is a man of slog and sadness. He feels increasingly out of kilter with the modern world, and the crimes he encounters seem like the year's encroaching darkness, the world revolving away from innocence.

But Mankell sets against these first Scandinavian memories his first dreams. 'I grew up near a river and for me it was the Congo. The logs that were sent down that river were crocodiles. Africa was the strangest place I could imagine. It was the end of the world. And so I always wanted to go there, as if I had a genetic memory of being a nomad. I wanted to find out what is behind the wood, behind the mountain. When I was 22, I did go. Of course, I found out that there is no end of the world. Africa exists. It was the end of the journey of a young child, the beginning of another kind of journey.'

Now Mankell lives half the year in Sweden, writing novels set in the weather of his native land, and half the year in Mozambique, where he is the head of Teatro Avenida in Maputo. He has 'one foot in the sand and the other in the snow'. It isn't a double life, but a 'complete one. I am like an artist who must stand close to the canvas to paint, but then stand back to see what he has painted. My life has that movement. Some things you can only see at a distance.'

The day I meet him, Mankell is in Scandinavian mode. He has just arrived from Gothenburg. He's been up since dawn and it took him three jammed hours to get into London from Heathrow. He's tired and travel-stained. His shirt is creased and his face pouched and rumpled. His English slips. He slides back in his chair with his morning beer and doesn't smile, but frowns, intense, even sombre.

All his life, Mankell has written. Now in his mid-fifties, he has produced dozens of plays and between 30 and 40 books. He says people have always bought his books but none has approached the popularity of his Wallander novels: 'I'm read by the Prime Minister and by prisoners. By teachers and immigrants.' He wrote the first of them, Faceless Killers, in 1989. 'I had been away from Sweden for some time. When I returned, I became aware that racism was exploding, and I decided to write about that. Because, to me, the expression of racism is a crime, I decided I should write a crime story. So I needed a police officer. I came up with Wallander. It was that way round - I didn't invent Wallander and then search for a story to give him.' In Faceless Killers, an elderly couple are murdered on an isolated farm after being brutally tortured and the woman's final word, 'foreign', unleashes a ferociously anti-refugee sentiment in the community.

Wallander, called in to solve this crime and then the crimes in the subsequent eight books (five of them have been published in the UK so far: The Dogs of Riga, Faceless Killers, Sidetracked, The Fifth Woman and One Step Behind and, in April, The White Lioness) is the key to Mankell's success. He is a decent, hard-working, pragmatic, unglamorous detective who fails as often as he succeeds. He has a broken marriage, a troubled, grown-up daughter and a fraught relationship with his ageing father. He drinks too much coffee and alcohol and worries about his weight. He's a bit lonely, a bit cynical, a bit dysfunctional; sometimes, he feels like giving up but he never does. He makes resolutions about his personal life that he doesn't keep. At night, he has bad dreams. Sometimes he can't sleep, and is haunted by images of the crimes he is trying to solve - a girl in flames in a corn field, a scalped man, a slaughtered friend.

Mankell says that he doesn't actually really like Wallander that much: 'If we met, we'd never get on. I'd prefer to meet Sherlock Holmes. Wallander has a strange attitude to women; he is lazy in his personal life. He works well, though; he's a clever thinker. Women readers adore him. Perhaps they sense he is needy. What interests me is the way he is thinking. You can have six or seven pages when that's all he's doing. Thinking. Reading a room.'

One Step Behind combines a pared-down prose (it opens: 'The rain stopped shortly after 5pm') with a baroque, garish situation: three young people, dressed in costume, meet on Midsummer's Eve to enact a masque and are murdered. Months later, the killer rearranges their rotting bodies on a picnic rug for discovery. He strikes again: a couple posing for their wedding photograph. The crime is complicated by the apparent involvement of one of Wallander's colleagues, who is murdered in his home and whose mysterious private life then must be probed.

'Whatever I write,' says Mankell, 'I have to begin with a question, something I don't know the answer to. Here, it is: what happens to people when they're thrown out on to the margins of society, who realise every day that they aren't needed? I always start with a question, an issue. Then the story comes. And then Wallander, thinking. That's how it must work. Detective novels are one of the oldest traditions in literature. Conan Doyle, Edgar Allen Poe, Heart of Darkness. And Macbeth. And the ancient Greek dramas - these are my greatest inspiration. They are all about crimes and the psychological examination of culture.' And sometimes it seems in a Mankell novel that the violence and privations of Africa has been transplanted to Sweden.

Mankell says that compared to most people, the drama of his life has been inside his head. Yet his mother left when he was too young to remember her, and he only saw her again when he was 15. They met in a restaurant in Stockholm and her first words to him were: 'I have the flu.' He did not really miss her when she died, not the way he missed his beloved father. 'I have always asked my wives, if they can sense the motherless child inside me but they say no.' He has been married four times and his fourth wife, a daughter of Ingmar Bergman, is, he says emphatically, 'the last'. He also has four children, and if he has often been out of the country he has never, he insists, 'been absent from them'.

The melancholy voice of Wallander, the rain in his soul, might seem typically Swedish, but Mankell says his own bleakness comes from Africa.

'What Africa has taught me is that the worst thing in the world is the fact that there is so much suffering that is absolutely unnecessary. We could stop it tomorrow. No child need die from malaria. How much do you think it would cost to teach every child in the world to read and write? Lots of money - yes. The same lots of money that we in the West spend on pet food. People say that Europe sends lots of aid money to Africa. Lots, yes - the same amount over 10 years that West Germany gave to East Germany in the decade after the wall came down.'

He weeps when he talks about the Memory Books project in Africa, the books that parents dying of Aids are being encouraged to write for their young children to read when they are orphans.

'Books are messengers. Like the diary of Anne Frank, they speak for the dead. The Memory Books will be the most dramatic books of our time, the heritage of being human. Aids is the most catastrophic disease in the history of mankind. It is killing off complete societies. There will be herds of kids without parents, millions, like wild dogs in packs.'

He wipes his hand across his forehead. 'It is very difficult to be young now. Must we die because we love?'

In spite of his double ('complete') life and his three divorces, Mankell says the drama of his life has been inside his head; the secret, passionate drama of writing. 'I came to the world to tell stories. The day I can't, I will die. The storytelling and the lifeline are the same.' He tells me that in the Amazon there is a small bird that 'from the time it starts to fly cannot stop. If it stops flying, it perishes. I am that bird.'

About this article

Interview: Henning Mankell

This article appeared on p8 of the Observer Review section of the Observer
on Saturday 1 March 2003.
It was published on
the Guardian website
at 08.23 EST on Sunday 2 March 2003.
It was last modified at 08.23 EST on Monday 3 March 2003.
It was first published at 08.23 EST on Monday 3 March 2003.